Blog

Rising US income inequality: the disproportionate gains of the highest earners

The increase in U.S. income inequality since 1970 largely reflects gains made by households in the top 20 per cent of the income distribution. Estimates suggest that households outside this group have suffered significant losses from foregone consumption, measured relative to a scenario that holds inequality constant. A substantial mitigating factor for the losses has been the dramatic rise […]

If there is an area where behavioural economics can have an impact on individual wellbeing, it is health. Traditional economic concepts – spanning from consumption and investment reasons for a ‘demand for health’, the assumption that […]

When multinationals offshore production, where do they locate innovation?

With the emergence of global value chains (GVCs), production processes have become increasingly fragmented and dispersed across different countries. R&D (research & development) and innovation have typically been among the least internationalised functions of the value chain and were traditionally considered as ‘core activities’ to be retained close to companies’ headquarters. But despite the important ‘home bias’ in global […]

Skilled migrants have higher earning potential in countries with more inequality

Attracting and retaining high-skill individuals is vital for the development of knowledge-based economies, in which ideas drive technological progress. Understanding whether and why high-skilled individuals stay in a country or leave it is therefore crucial – for sending and receiving countries alike.

A very influential theoretical model of migrant selection (Borjas 1987, building on Roy 1951) predicts that migrants to […]

Italian women face dramatic earnings losses after the birth of a child

Female labour force participation has increased in most European countries in the last decades: the activity rate in EU15 has constantly increased in the last 20 years, gaining more than 10 percentage points (from 56 to 68 per cent). Nonetheless, the gender earnings gap remains substantially high in most countries.

Information inequality makes voters vulnerable to manipulation

The media industry is unique in its ability to spread information that may influence the democratic process. There is ample evidence that news coverage influences voting and policy-making, and this issue has become even more prominent after the controversy over the role of ‘fake news’ in the 2016 US presidential election.

We need to have a career plan B up our sleeves

Our societies, especially in developed countries, will soon have a majority of their adult population in the over 50 group. The UK will reach this point in the mid 2030s. This increasing healthy longevity means that at age 50 we likely have 25-30 years of health and energy to look forward to. At the same time, most of us […]

Facebook’s light approach to corporate governance

Amongst the regular challenges of modern governance are the corporate scandals. These have affected almost every business sector, most recently of course the so-called disruptive Big Tech companies. It seems none of these social media technology companies are exempt from scandal. Google have been accused of abusing the dominance of its Android smart phone operating system and Apple were […]

Algorithms raise a number of critical issues for regulation

The regulation of and by algorithms has become of growing relevance to the delivery of public services, coinciding with the related interest in open and big data. Debates about the consequences of the rise of algorithms have been however limited. Early contributions considered whether the rise of algorithmic regulation and new information technologies represented a fundamental (mostly benevolent) change […]

The future of innovation: democratising influence

There is a lot of talk about the future of work with developments such as AI, telecommuting, and the gig economy making headlines. Techno-utopianists fantasize about a future where manual labour is obsolete; economic innovators dream of the transformative nature of a basic minimum wage; and, entrepreneurs promote new workplace models. Such changes propel us into a future with […]

Post-Truth: Why We Have Reached Peak Bullshit and What We Can Do About It – Book Review

If you are interested in this book, you may like to listen to a podcast of Evan Davis’s lecture, ‘Post-Truth: How We Have Reached Peak Bullshit and What We Can Do About It’, recorded at LSE on 18 October 2017.

Post-Truth: Why We Have Reached Peak Bullshit and What We Can Do About It. Evan Davis. Little, Brown. 2017.

Galileo satellites illuminate EU-UK divorce tensions

One of the first tangible effects of leaving the European Union is that Britain will need a new, bi-lateral treaty on satellite navigation systems as well as a security treaty with the European Union, in order to retain its place in the prestigious Galileo satellite programme after March 2019. Even then, Britain may end up with only observer status, […]

Teen girls and the earliest gender inequalities in the labour market

The pay gap between men and women is a longstanding problem in both American workplaces and women’s lives, and a new experiment reveals why a commonly proposed solution may not actually help. There have been a number of explanations given for the gender wage gap, but in recent years, one of the dominant explanations is that the wage gap […]

Disruptive trade technologies will usher in the ‘internet of rules’

Businesses, especially micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs), face many challenges in understanding and complying with international commercial rules and regulations. Research also indicates low utilisation of eligible tariff preferences, or favourable tax rules, by traders. In other words, many businesses do not always effectively benefit from their negotiated market advantages. Unfortunately, the current “version history” (or stage in the […]

Mismanaged souls: why does employee engagement remain stubbornly low?

You would have to have been in solitary confinement in a particularly remote location during recent years not to be aware of the tidal-wave of interest there has been in employee engagement. High levels of engagement have been associated with a host of important benefits to both employers in terms of raised performance and productivity, and for employees in […]

Gaza’s endemic economic misery lies behind the confrontation

On Feb. 4, the Israeli Defense Forces’ chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, issued a stark warning to his country’s government: Israel could soon face another conflict in Gaza with the Islamic fundamentalist group Hamas because of deteriorating economic and humanitarian conditions in the territory. Eisenkot said Gaza’s Palestinian residents suffered from chronic shortages of the most basic […]

Digital China is coming to Europe

Often unnoticed by business leaders in Europe, Chinese technology companies are on the move. Hardly a week goes by without news that Alibaba has acquired a company in Southeast Asia, Tencent has invested in an Israeli startup or that Baidu is entering a new industry. Western onlookers may think that this is unlikely to have a direct impact on […]

It has become increasingly common for academics to use social media to communicate with wider audiences. Twitter, like many other social platforms, typically measures success in terms of numbers of followers, likes and re-tweets, but this only tells us something about the spreading of messages but not necessarily whether the content of the messages is understood or embraced. One […]

The EU’s data protection regulation will be a wake up call for companies’ cyber security

As businesses, we’re more vulnerable than ever. Whether you’re a private or public sector organisation, there is now an even chance that in any 12-month period, you’ll experience at least one cyber incident. Which means for those who haven’t had a potential threat on their radar to date, what you’re experiencing is merely the luck of an extremely narrow […]